Ulises

This book is dedicated to

JOHN FRANCIS MCCARTHY

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to

touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more

gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma

dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He

pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and

blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream

from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the

hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable

swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone

flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth

and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a

great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature

that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with

eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the

water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked

and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its

bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head

from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and

loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road

and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He

thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for

years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.

Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the

blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among

the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing

smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and

wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the

land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of

God God never spoke.

When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him

and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with

their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup.

He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out

and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat

watching the boy sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried

somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees

toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it

was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he

said.

I'm right here.

I know.

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy

carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to

abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a

chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted

the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road

was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless

and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The

boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling

through the ash, each the other's world entire.

They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon

a roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should

check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about

them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The

cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of

gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The

pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door

to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one

wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use.

Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A

metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy

stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old automotive manuals swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He

crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the

number of his father's house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you

doing? he said.

A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We're not thinking, he

said. We have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it

could not be seen and they left their packs and went back to the station. In the

service bay he dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all

the quart plastic oilbottles. Then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs

one by one, leaving the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the

end they had almost a half quart of motor oil. He screwed down the plastic cap and

wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to

light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy

said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn.

Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over

the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles

whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of

meadow-lands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay

abandoned. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once

had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the hill they stood in the cold and

the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I'm all right, the boy said. The

man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them.

He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain

down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing

sketched across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes.

Of course you can. The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you

see? the man said. Nothing. He lowered the glasses. It's raining. Yes, the man said. I

know.

They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope

through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he'd seen a running ledge of

rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow

across the valley. It was very cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a

blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the

dripping in the woods.

When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got

their blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the

hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms

around the boy trying to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless

dark come to enshroud them. The gray shape of the city vanished in the night's onset

like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they

walked out to the road and he took the boy's hand and they went to the top of the

hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country

to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any

sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the side of the

hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything

too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding

with the lamp between them. He'd brought the boy's book but the boy was too tired

for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I'm asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we

can.

He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man.

His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world

thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.

Yes. Of course.

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not now.

And we're still going south.

Yes.

So we'll be warm.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay what?

Nothing. Just okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay.

I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?

Yes. That's okay.

And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?

Yes. Of course you can.

What would you do if I died?

If you died I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes. So I could be with you.

Okay.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the

silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and

fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything

uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath,

trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He

rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he

walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he

crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes.

He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at

the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you

eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.

They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to

hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The

city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything

covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway

dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that

the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think

about that.

You forget some things, dont you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to

forget.

There was a lake a mile from his uncle's farm where he and his uncle used to go in

the fall for firewood. He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold

wake while his uncle bent to the oars. The old man's feet in their black kid shoes

braced against the uprights. His straw hat. His cob pipe in his teeth and a thin drool

swinging from the pipebowl. He turned to take a sight on the far shore, cradling the

oarhandles, taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his

hand. The shore was lined with birchtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of

the evergreens beyond. The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the windfall trees of a hurricane years past. The trees themselves had long

been sawed for firewood and carried away. His uncle turned the boat and shipped

the oars and they drifted over the sandy shallows until the transom grated in the

sand. A dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water. Yellow leaves. They left their

shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and set

out the anchor at the end of its rope. A lardcan poured with concrete with an eyebolt

in the center. They walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps,

puffing at his pipe, a manila rope coiled over his shoulder. He picked one out and

they turned it over, using the roots for leverage, until they got it half floating in the

water. Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat

at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly

behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle

of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A

radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of

his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.

They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill

country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate

highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and

growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked

out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was

burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and

billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of

the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk.

They were days fording that cauterized terrain. The boy had found some crayons

and painted his facemask with fangs and he trudged on uncomplaining. One of the

front wheels of the cart had gone wonky. What to do about it? Nothing. Where all

was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and

dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To

take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in

the blackness.

He woke to the sound of distant thunder and sat up. The faint light all about,

quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of drifting soot. He pulled the tarp

about them and he lay awake a long time listening. If they got wet there'd be no fires

to dry by. If they got wet they would probably die.

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A

blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. No sound but the

wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic

dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull

cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but

preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness,

counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what?

Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were

common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long

day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet

know it must.

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest

of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy

said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand

and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom.

They pushed on together with the tarp pulled over them. The wet gray flakes twisting

and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from

under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires on the distant ridges. He thought

the bloodcults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No

road-agents, no marauders. After a while they came to a roadside garage and they

stood within the open door and looked out at the gray sleet gusting down out of the

high country.

They collected some old boxes and built a fire in the floor and he found some tools

and emptied out the cart and sat working on the wheel. He pulled the bolt and bored

out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he'd cut to

length with a hacksaw. Then he bolted it all back together and stood the cart upright

and wheeled it around the floor. It ran fairly true. The boy sat watching everything.

In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor.

Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and

dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said.

There could be some corn or something. Let's go, the man said.

Mostly he worried about their shoes. That and food. Always food. In an old

batboard smokehouse they found a ham gambreled up in a high corner. It looked

like something fetched from a tomb, so dried and drawn. He cut into it with his

knife. Deep red and salty meat inside. Rich and good. They fried it that night over

their fire, thick slices of it, and put the slices to simmer with a tin of beans. Later he

woke in the dark and he thought that he'd heard bulldrums beating somewhere in the

low dark hills. Then the wind shifted and there was just the silence.

In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her nipples

pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark

hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her downturned

eyes. In the morning it was snowing again. Beads of small gray ice strung along the

light-wires overhead.

He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of

peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and he slept

poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he

and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself

from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach

from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough

the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of

it slowly fading from memory.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could

remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him

leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall

columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap

and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer

dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

He fashioned sweeps from two old brooms he'd found and wired them to the cart to

clear the limbs from the road in front of the wheels and he put the boy in the basket

and stood on the rear rail like a dogmusher and they set off down the hills, guiding

the cart on the curves with their bodies in the manner of bobsledders. It was the first

that he'd seen the boy smile in a long time.

At the crest of the hill was a curve and a pullout in the road. An old trail that led off

through the woods. They walked out and sat on a bench and looked out over the

valley where the land rolled away into the gritty fog. A lake down there. Cold and

gray and heavy in the scavenged bowl of the countryside.

What is that, Papa?

It's a dam.

What's it for?

It made the lake. Before they built the dam that was just a river down there. The

dam used the water that ran through it to turn big fans called turbines that would

generate electricity.

To make lights.

Yes. To make lights.

Can we go down there and see it?

I think it's too far.

Will the dam be there for a long time?

I think so. It's made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of

years. Thousands, even.

Do you think there could be fish in the lake?

No. There's nothing in the lake.

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the

long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost

from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and

trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

The grainy air. The taste of it never left your mouth. They stood in the rain like farm

animals. Then they went on, holding the tarp over them in the dull drizzle. Their feet

were wet and cold and their shoes were being ruined. On the hillsides old crops dead

and flattened. The barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold

dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for

centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

The weather lifted and the cold and they came at last into the broad lowland river valley, the pieced farmland still visible, everything dead to the root along the barren

bottomlands. They trucked on along the blacktop. Tall clapboard houses.

Machinerolled metal roofs. A log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded

ten-foot letters across the roofslope. See Rock City.

The roadside hedges were gone to rows of black and twisted brambles. No sign of

life. He left the boy standing in the road holding the pistol while he climbed an old

set of limestone steps and walked down the porch of the farmhouse shading his eyes

and peering in the windows. He let himself in through the kitchen. Trash in the floor,

old newsprint. China in a breakfront, cups hanging from their hooks. He went down

the hallway and stood in the door to the parlor. There was an antique pumporgan in

the corner. A television set. Cheap stuffed furniture together with an old handmade

cherrywood chifforobe. He climbed the stairs and walked through the bedrooms.

Everything covered with ash. A child's room with a stuffed dog on the windowsill

looking out at the garden. He went through the closets. He stripped back the beds

and came away with two good woolen blankets and went back down the stairs. In

the pantry were three jars of homecanned tomatoes. He blew the dust from the lids

and studied them. Someone before him had not trusted them and in the end neither

did he and he walked out with the blankets over his shoulder and they set off along

the road again.

On the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket. A few old cars in the

trashstrewn parking lot. They left the cart in the lot and walked the littered aisles. In

the produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans

and what looked to have once been apricots, long dried to wrinkled effigies of

themselves. The boy followed behind. They pushed out through the rear door. In the

alleyway behind the store a few shopping carts, all badly rusted. They went back

through the store again looking for another cart but there were none. By the door

were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with

a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works

of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder.

He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.

What is it, Papa?

It's a treat. For you.

What is it?

Here. Sit down.

He slipped the boy's knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind

him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and

opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed

it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.

The boy took the can. It's bubbly, he said.

Go ahead.

He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking

about it. It's really good, he said.

Yes. It is.

You have some, Papa.

I want you to drink it.

You have some.

He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let's just

sit here.

It's because I wont ever get to drink another one, isnt it?

Ever's a long time.

Okay, the boy said.

By dusk of the day following they were at the city. The long concrete sweeps of the

interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk. He

carried the revolver in his belt at the front and wore his parka unzipped. The

mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to

tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of

boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like

pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.

They went on. He kept constant watch behind him in the mirror. The only thing that

moved in the streets was the blowing ash. They crossed the high concrete bridge

over the river. A dock below. Small pleasureboats half sunken in the gray water. Tall

stacks downriver dim in the soot.

The day following some few miles south of the city at a bend in the road and half

lost in the dead brambles they came upon an old frame house with chimneys and

gables and a stone wall. The man stopped. Then he pushed the cart up the drive.

What is this place, Papa?

It's the house where I grew up.

The boy stood looking at it. The peeling wooden clapboards were largely gone

from the lower walls for firewood leaving the studs and the insulation exposed. The

rotted screening from the back porch lay on the concrete terrace.

Are we going in?

Why not?

I'm scared.

Dont you want to see where I used to live?

No.

It'll be okay.

There could be somebody here.

I dont think so.

But suppose there is?

He stood looking up at the gable to his old room. He looked at the boy. Do you

want to wait here?

No. You always say that.

I'm sorry.

I know. But you do.

They slipped out of their backpacks and left them on the terrace and kicked their

way through the trash on the porch and pushed into the kitchen. The boy held on to

his hand. All much as he'd remembered it. The rooms empty. In the small room off

the diningroom there was a bare iron cot, a metal foldingtable. The same castiron

coalgrate in the small fireplace. The pine paneling was gone from the walls leaving

just the furring strips. He stood there. He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of

the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago. This is

where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the

waste of the yard. A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold winter

nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here, me and

my sisters, doing our homework. The boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming

him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didnt.

They walked through the diningroom where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow

as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened. The

floor buckled from the rainwater. In the livingroom the bones of a small animal

dismembered and placed in a pile. Possibly a cat. A glass tumbler by the door. The

boy gripped his hand. They went up the stairs and turned and went down the

hallway. Small cones of damp plaster standing in the floor. The wooden lathes of the

ceiling exposed. He stood in the doorway to his room. A small space under the

eaves. This is where I used to sleep. My cot was against this wall. In the nights in

their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful

such as might offer themselves but never the one to be. He pushed open the closet

door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from

the roof. Gray as his heart.

We should go, Papa. Can we go?

Yes. We can go.

I'm scared.

I know. I'm sorry.

I'm really scared.

It's all right. We shouldnt have come.

Three nights later in the foothills of the eastern mountains he woke in the darkness to

hear something coming. He lay with his hands at either side of him. The ground was

trembling. It was coming toward them.

Papa? The boy said. Papa?

Shh. It's okay.

What is it, Papa?

It neared, growing louder. Everything trembling. Then it passed beneath them like

an underground train and drew away into the night and was gone. The boy clung to

him crying, his head buried against his chest. Shh. It's all right.

I'm so scared.

I know. It's all right. It's gone.

What was it, Papa?

It was an earthquake. It's gone now. We're all right. Shh.

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their

clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like

ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their

eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like

migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling

issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the

class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time.

But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

He sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon

and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint

concerns. At eight the primrose closes. He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it?

When the time comes? Can you?

They squatted in the road and ate cold rice and cold beans that they'd cooked days

ago. Already beginning to ferment. No place to make a fire that would not be seen.

They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the

boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a

good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood

between him and death.

Late in the year. He hardly knew the month. He thought they had enough food to get

through the mountains but there was no way to tell. The pass at the watershed was

five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold. He said that everything

depended on reaching the coast, yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was

empty and no substance to it. There was a good chance they would die in the

mountains and that would be that.

They passed through the ruins of a resort town and took the road south. Burnt

forests for miles along the slopes and snow sooner than he would have thought. No

tracks in the road, nothing living anywhere. The fireblackened boulders like the

shapes of bears on the starkly wooded slopes. He stood on a stone bridge where the

waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in a gray foam. Where once he'd

watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones

beneath. They went on, the boy trudging in his track. Leaning into the cart, winding

slowly upward through the switchbacks. There were fires still burning high in the

mountains and at night they could see the light from them deep orange in the

soot-fall. It was getting colder but they had campfires all night and left them burning

behind them when they set out again in the morning. He'd wrapped their feet in

sacking tied with cord and so far the snow was only a few inches deep but he knew

that if it got much deeper they would have to leave the cart. Already it was hard

going and he stopped often to rest. Slogging to the edge of the road with his back to

the child where he stood bent with his hands on his knees, coughing. He raised up

and stood with weeping eyes. On the gray snow a fine mist of blood.

They camped against a boulder and he made a shelter of poles with the tarp. He got

a fire going and they set about dragging up a great brushpile of wood to see them

through the night. They'd piled a mat of dead hemlock boughs over the snow and

they sat wrapped in their blankets watching the fire and drinking the last of the cocoa

scavenged weeks before. It was snowing again, soft flakes drifting down out of the

blackness. He dozed in the wonderful warmth. The boy's shadow crossed over him.

Carrying an armload of wood. He watched him stoke the flames. God's own

firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying

words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

Ulises

jueves, 1 de octubre de 2015

domingo, 27 de octubre de 2013